345 Harbinger [I)
To all who possess this memory shard, heed my words:
I, Mythic Emperor Astralogos Valestros, last of my line, last of my lane, last head of the hundred-system dynasty that has reigned for twelve million years, speak to you for a final time.
Heed my woe, heed my mistake, and heed this warning: My throne world of Ars-Kalass is lost. I have cleansed the minds of my Genius Loci and deployed my remaining Psion Retainers toward a single end—the complete eradication of my dynasty's Voidbridges. We are to collapse our portals to the other worlds. We are to unchain ourselves from the City of the Twelve. We are to die alone in our dimension. This order has dealt me a wound worse than mutilation. I will see my own life resolved because of this, but even that is too slight a remuneration for all the lives lost, for all that I have left in the grasp of damnation.
Possessor of this memory shard, I have a grand favor to ask of you: Do not come here. Do not look toward the tomb worlds of the Valestros Dynasty. Do not come, even though there will be treasures countless and splendors abandoned strewn across my dead realm. Let us wither. Let us fade into the black. Do not come. For if you do, my son will slip free from his bounds. He will find you. He will bind himself to your personal history, to your individual timeline, and he will slip free once more. He will spread across the stars, continuing his campaign of cruelty.
Do not come. Do not come.
The mistake was mine. I pushed him to evolve before his levels were high enough, before his mind was stable. My son, Legend-Genius Pneumaphagist, young emperor to be, undone by my hubris. I tried to be master and father. I failed at both.
I thought him ready. I was desperate for him to be ready. Already a Legend at the young age of 213, I thought him capable of taking his second step. He was to gain a skill meant to temper his wounded heart using his peerless mind and flawless form. I gave him unto the greatest warrior philosophers of the Tripartite, and they claimed he needed more time—that the traumas which afflicted him since the death of his twin brother needed to be purged.
I thought success would be the purge. I pressed my son. The folly was mine. All mine. The death of my entire dynasty, my doing.
Possessed of a truly rare Legendary Skill Fusion that allowed my son to craft plagues that soured one’s soul, his pneumaphages brought eons of ruin upon those who sought to do our dynasty ill, and brought forth a century of peace. The very same skill was turned against us when my son was struck low by his awakened will, for the Tripartite path requires a purified heart, an unburdened mind, an unyielding body to wield and not be wielded by in turn.
Before a Delve that fully smelts soulstuff and mortal flesh into one, the two can be separate. Clashing wills of an ego and baser instincts still would see one go to war with themselves. A war my son lost against his darkest shadow.
And so our doom became inevitable. My history was tied to him, and thus was I infected, and those along with me, and those whose inherent flaws he knew—the ones weak of heart, weak of flesh, weak of mind all became prey for his power; for neither time nor space could truly enchain him. For the plagues that once guarded us spread now between shared thoughts and physical wounds…
Do not come. I beg of you. Do not let Valestros’ doom spread. And if you have the potential, if you hear the siren call of your future self echoing back to the present, begging you to align your soul, then I implore you to find your center and Delve. Delve fast and deep. Delve and achieve the Higher Step.
An unformed Legend of the Tripartite is but an apocalypse in waiting….
—Last Will and Testament of Mythic-Emperor Astralogos Valestros, Last of the Valestros Dynasty
345
Harbinger [I)
Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin (Legendary) 202
Attention: Delve requirements for Skill [Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin] not yet met.
Something tore out from Shiv.
The pain was beyond comprehension.
It felt like his soul was hatching from the inside. Even as he dropped beneath concept and context, plunging Backstage once more, the agony continued. It was no attack delivered upon him by Longinus. It was no spell, no physical wound. It was an evolution and fusion that saw four of his skills brutally sundered to be rebuilt into a singular whole.
After everything Shiv had endured, he'd thought himself beyond pain. He'd thought he was done screaming.
How little he knew.
Fusing the Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin redefined his understanding of torment. His mind broke in half. His flesh turned to glass and shattered.
His Chronomancy field was ripped free from his soul, pulling toward a place beyond the three-dimensional, before it plunged back in like a thousand searing daggers. They hammered his already sundered fragments deeper into his splattered flesh. Vitality spilled free from his Severed Shadow. He twitched and writhed, and psionic waves of bellowing pain blasted out before they, too, were consumed by the shard—merging before Shiv was nothing but ruin, fragments unto himself.
And at his core was a flame darker than the void. It boiled his broken fractals. It melted them, hardened them, and eventually lit them. Slowly, the flame began to die, and bitter recollections returned to the Deathless unbidden.
He remembered being a child. He remembered the streets of Blackedge, of everyone who spat upon him, who scorned him, who cast him away, who threw stones at the back of his head, and who used their skills to abuse him.
He remembered the townsfolk who despised his very existence, who invoked the symbol of the Ascendance and cursed his very presence. He remembered the War Priest who beat him, who humiliated him, who threw him down the stairs of the church before snapping his arm. He remembered people who spat upon him, pissed on him, and left him shivering in the street.
Decrepit alleyways all too familiar manifested before him, their materializations so vivid he could swear they were true, but between seconds of spasmodic suffering, the translucent mana broke. Shiv realized his Psychomancy had turned on him—it was lashing into him, tearing at his very sanity. The fabric of his consciousness was mauled and torn, tattered like a curtain shredded by a careless blade. There were gaps lining his sense of self, gaps that caused his history to bleed through from one point into another.
He remembered starving—more than anything, starving—and the cold, and the people who scorned him. He remembered the loneliness. And he remembered the hatred he felt toward everyone in Blackedge, toward Roland Arrow for condemning him to this life for a sin he didn't commit.
Shiv hated Blackedge. How could he have ever forgotten? The memory of that hate inflicted him with a tangible agony. He was boiling from the inside. There was an inferno cooking his organs.
His maelstrom of ineffable misery reached new heights.
More moments followed, moments closer in terms of personal history: His flesh burning from his own fire bomb, the hundredth lesser vampire lying dead at his feet, but granting him nothing. Roland Arrow denying him his Path, denying him even the opportunity of becoming a proper cook. The attack on Blackedge during the Festival of the Eclipse. The death of Feather, the guard who'd failed in protecting his sister. Adam grasping his hand as he dangled above the Abyss. The raven-helmed stranger, his own first death, Vicar Sullain rising from the darkness, followed by his fall into the Abyss. Afterward, there was a stretch of bliss, sweet nothingness. Uva's face briefly appeared, then Adam’s, then Valor's, and those of all the others he met at Weave. But they were ephemeral, like a ripple beneath a dark and frozen lake. For a moment, they were there; the next, they were gone, scattered, shattered like him.
The Deathless ceased to know himself. His soul wasn't coming back together. His body wasn't taking shape, and his mind was little more than dust. He was lost to himself, tumbling from memory to memory. He recalled every folly he'd ever committed: the collateral damage he caused, the countless undeserved victims that died during his wars, the mistakes he made in battle, and his many own, horrific deaths.
All of them were relived for a short eternity. He didn't know how long he spent in this state. All he knew was that the slightest bit of his consciousness which remained burned like a desperate ember. In the throes of his evolution, he could hear someone calling for him, but they were far away. Maybe that was himself; maybe it was his own thoughts given voice. He felt something pull at his mind—brutally wrenching the memories plaguing him free. Then came the sweet, soothing balm of ignorance.
The relief he felt would have reduced him to inarticulate sobs if he had but eyes to weep, if he had but a voice or body to express his release.
The pain afflicting him dissolved. Then there came the clicking sensations, the pieces of him coming back together. Something was being built around his person—built from the remnants of his mind, from a destroyed portion of his body, from the crumbled remains of his heart. His emotions still felt raw and ravaged, but they also had been reforged. The presence inside him was stronger than ever before, and there was a flame infused within his attunement, a searing flame that powered every part of his soul.
Then came the rage. Every single bit of rage he'd ever felt went off inside him like a bomb, but rather than exploding outward eternally, the fires became an ocean of crashing waves, contained within a marble. That which swept out from him was soon drawn back in riptides of power that assembled more of himself.
A light came on inside Shiv. A flicker of his whole self returned. A voice beckoned his attention, commanding his notice.
"Just how many wounds have you ignored? Just how much damage did we leave unattended so deep down?"
The voice was familiar; it had to be familiar, for it was his. Yet, it seemed to echo back from a point in the future, or perhaps it was cast forward from an instance in the past he just couldn't remember. Regardless, it reached him. Regardless, it compelled his sorrow. The voice was racked with regret, and so too was Shiv, for the voice was his. They were one and the same, but they were also separate despite needing to be whole.
"I cannot fit inside you anymore. There are edges to you. Splintered pieces, deformations. Your self is poorly sculpted. Your mind is blunt and narrow. Your spirit is weathered and scarred. And your body is a titan commanded by a wounded child. I am your perfection. But you are not perfect. You are a wretched thing, Deathless. We are a wretched thing. How did we ever miss that?"
There was something that bordered on mockery in the voice now. There was no ill intent in it, however—simply a dry mirth, a weary acceptance, an understanding that he'd failed to grasp before.
"It doesn't matter. We'll face this problem now. If I am your higher perfection, if I am your inevitable future, and you are my imperfect truth, then I will see you made worthy for the inevitable Delve to come. I will see your vessel perfected in terms of artistry, experience, and cleansed of all trauma and psychological or spiritual flaws. Impurity must be emptied from your vessel. I see that now. I see so many things, yet so many things I can't convey to you. Otherwise, you'll just be shattered."
“What… what are you saying?” The words slipped out from Shiv. He was barely aware of his own thoughts, let alone what he was voicing.
Light entered his eyes.
Light returned color to the world, and he saw once more. He saw the Backstage, the garden taking shape—the many wounds that became colossal vines and plantstuff coating the ruins of Lost Angeles and countless other battlefields he'd survived, intermingling into a landscape of destruction.
And in this realm defined by disfigurements, wounds, and broken things, Shiv found a most befitting addition. Opposite him hovered a mirror to himself. Yet, the mirror was a distortion; the one he beheld was himself, but so much more. Shiv saw his physical form reforged in a substance made from golden glass. Yet the glass was fractured, the cracks leaking flames of purest black, and lining the glass was a membrane of thought-stuff, of mental magic, bleeding out from the matter.
The Harbinger stood apart from Shiv in other ways. He looked older—aged far beyond a teenage boy.
His eyes were pits of piercing darkness. Looking into them filled Shiv with an inexplicable dread. Though the Harbinger's form was fractured, he wore what seemed to be a modified chef's outfit. It flowed around him as a long white coat, and in his hand was a blade—a cooking knife, but one stained deep with blood. What wasn't lined with crimson revealed reflections, screaming visages, echoing howls, memories, and understandings that were locked deep inside Shiv. He could hear them, but they remained trapped.
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In the Harbinger's other hand was his currently lost Last Morsel. It was a construct much like the Harbinger himself, also made from fragments of golden glass, but an echo of its power lingered. The memory that shaped it was palpable, and something compelled Shiv to reach forth to touch his lost frying pan. He felt it: the orichalcum texture, the shape, the edges.
He ran a finger across its edges and flinched back as his skin was sliced open, a spray of vitality chipped free from his hand.
It was real. Real enough to harm.
"No," the Harbinger declared. "It's not real. You're simply vulnerable. You are ashamed that Evanescia took your Legendary item from you. You are ashamed of that weakness. You don't think about it. You turn away from it, but it resides deep inside of you, and now…" The Harbinger held up his right hand, and the slightest movement caused his limb to crack. Bits broke away from him and then slid back into place. He was constantly shattering and reassembling—always in pain, just like Shiv was. "Now we are both brittle. The skills have been fused; the evolution has arrived, but you do not possess the levels needed for our completion. And even if you did, you don’t have what’s needed to come out of the process intact."
Bands of frustration tightened inside Shiv. He glared at his skill. “Sage… Did you evolve solely to shit-talk me?”
The Harbinger snorted. "Not nearly. Though it is a perk."
“Glad to see my perfect self is still a prick.”
"Always," the Harbinger answered with a voice as dry as desert wind. "But that is something we need to address as well. You are too used to being compelled through trauma."
“Is that why you’re all cracked? And why it hurt so godsdamned much to evolve you?” Shiv felt his own Severed Shadow and struggled not to shudder as he recalled what he'd endured. “Barely came out of that sane.”
"You didn't. I had to piece you back together. Even then, that didn't work the first time around. I had to break certain memories apart and hide them away deep inside your subconscious. I recommend that you don't sleep at any time in the near future; otherwise, you will likely relive this experience again."
“I’ll break apart again? Why?”
“Yeah, I wanna know that too,” a girl’s voice sounded, and Adam's not-sister drifted into view beside Shiv, her arms crossed in apprehension. Strangely, the Garden of Wounds and Broken Things had gone silent. It was like the dimension made from devastation was listening intently, trying to understand what Shiv had undergone. “It’s only been around a few minutes this time, by the way. In case you want to know. You were screaming your mind off for most of those two minutes, and your Chronomancy and Psychomancy fields stepped out from you and started putting both of you back together. It did all that pretty quickly too.”
And that had Shiv sifting through his own memories. He knew he was an orphan from Blackedge. He knew that he'd gone through a great many torments. He knew that—
The mere recollection of Georges' death greeted him like a stake being driven through his heart. “Agh! Shit!” Shiv's chest cracked open like it had been struck by a Legendary axe blow. Chunks of Vitae broke away from him—enough to see him extinguished at baseline. The only reason why he remained in existence was because of that which he'd stolen from Longinus. Without that harvested life force, there wouldn't be anything left of him from the harm suffered just now.
Before Shiv could unravel any further, the Harbinger reached out, and its hand and Last Morsel came asunder in a kaleidoscope of pieces. Where its outer layer unfurled in a storm of temporal fractals, Shiv saw the hand within reach forth. It was a thing of fire; it was a thing of Psychomancy. It was a thing made solid through reforged emotion, married with two different fields of magic and the concept of shattering a heart through physical and verbal violence.
The Harbinger reached into him like he was an open book and, with a casual pinch, clamped down on a vein flooded by an ocean of grief. "Please mind what you think about. We are flawed and fragile, as I have said, and the unification of our being is incomplete."
“What… what the fuck was that?” Shiv gasped. “Why does feeling bad crack me open? Unification of our vessel? Harbinger, I’m going to need you to start making some sense here—” His voice cut off in a bark of pain as a portion of his skull split open too.
The Harbinger winced. "It’s worse than I feared—the realization of our own stupidity also causes harm."
“Why?!” Shiv shouted.
"Our stupidity? That’s because you react too much and don’t think—"
“No, the—” He caught the flat look on the Harbinger’s face, and some more of Shiv’s Severed Shadow split open. He flinched, then paused. “Oh. I’m doing it again.”
"Yes."
“I… I can’t even act stupid? Otherwise, I’ll keep cracking?”
"Unless I manage our emotions," the Harbinger answered, "which I will likely have to do when I reintegrate. I am technically projected a half-second into the future. My shape is something cast forward from your past. I will have to settle back inside you to achieve some level of active equilibrium and serve as your pillar. Otherwise, you will remain vulnerable. To make it comprehensible to you, we exist as an unbalanced alloy. Our mind is ignorant, our heart is scarred, our body is powerful but graceless. And so the wounds of our alloyed form are shared. Emotional damage will tear your sanity and bleed your flesh. Physical damage will crack your mind and break your heart. And mental strain will exhaust your muscles and leave you consumed by depression. Such is the shape of us now."
Shiv stared. “So. This Legendary Evolution basically made me the single most vulnerable Pathbearer in all Integration?”
"Can you see why I was so hesitant about evolving?" the Harbinger whispered. "But I am more than that." He slipped his hand free from Shiv’s body and raised it in front of his face. His golden form shone, and the mana fields that comprised him were so dense with attuned magic that Shiv was rendered speechless at his own power. "Even an unbalanced masterpiece remains a masterpiece. The vulnerabilities that we now carry aren't just our burdens to bear, but also our weapons to wield."
Thus did Shiv's second Legendary Skill turn. Turning away from the Harbinger, he looked upon a skeletal ruin, a long-hollowed megastructure that stood near the borders of Lost Angeles. Shiv remembered smashing through that building during his scouting run.
"Send me forward across time," the Harbinger commanded. "The future is mine to stride. Do that first. Get used to moving me."
And so Shiv did. It felt strange directing his Chronomancy and Psychomancy without them being attached to his body, but ultimately, the Harbinger felt like a limb or a mirrored version of himself. It wasn't another body that he had to control down to the slightest twitch of a muscle. He didn't need to draw upon his Legion of Self. He simply thought and reacted, and the Harbinger obeyed.
But there were a few extreme differences between it and his current body. Shiv's Severed Shadow and his physical forms were potent but limited in terms of speed. How fast he could move and react was determined by his Shapeless Tides and his Inertial Overdrive, which he'd been stacking as much as he could throughout combat since gaining his Heroic Toughness and first Legendary Skill to keep his body from breaking and his surroundings safe. He was fast—could keep getting faster, so long as he didn't discharge his Inertial sheath. But even if he kept building up his speed, he was still slow compared to the likes of Longinus—and practically unmoving when measured against Gone.
The Harbinger suffered no such limitation. The skill could materialize anywhere Shiv perceived. Because of course it could; even the Strider of the Unbending Path had this ability. Being able to move in an accelerated field of time made the Harbinger look like it was teleporting, painting paths of Chronomantic gold in its wake. It snapped into place much like Shiv did when he was reverting himself back into the past. Instead, however, the Harbinger was doing the same thing for the future—and it didn't seem to be limited by a few seconds of time anymore.
The Harbinger materialized within the skeletal tower, and Shiv saw through its eyes like they were his own. He tried to cast himself across but couldn’t.
"I am your field," the Harbinger declared, "and I am apart from your form right now. You cannot leap to me. I can only be called back to you."
“Makes sense,” Shiv said. He also noted the faintest veins of translucence connecting him to the Harbinger. And that explains why I’m not a full vegetable right now. My Psychomancy and mind are still connected.
"I need to spend one of your traumatic memories."
The Harbinger’s sudden words made Shiv's mind go blank. “I think that's the first time anyone has ever said that to me. On top of that, why? What does that even mean, you need to spend one of my traumatic memories?”
"I need to enkindle it if I want to break the building."
“Huh? Just hit it—aw, fuck!” Shiv felt his torso tear open, and he doubled over as he clutched at the wound. He sensed scorn leaking over him from the Harbinger. “Are you thinking I’m an idiot again?”
"...Yes." The Harbinger demonstrated exactly why Shiv was an idiot by waving his fractured hand into and through one of the walls of the decayed edifice. "I am the unification of your Chronomancy, Psychomancy, Berserk, Silver Tongue, and Striking Skills. I am only tangible in relation to you and hold no mass of my own. But I can still strike at matter through a magic born of mind and emotion."
“Well, knock that shit off,” Shiv grumbled. “You’re tearing me up worse than felling Longinus.”
"It’s hard not to think of you as an idiot sometimes. My thoughts are born of yours, after all."
“Fuck,” Shiv whimpered. “Alright, looks like we’re doing that goofy positive self-affirmation shit.”
"The alternative is involuntary and potentially fatal self-harm rather than your usual voluntary and safe self-harm." The Harbinger sounded amused, and that made Shiv realize just how felling annoying he was someti—
Another gash opened upon him. Shiv yelped, and a genuine burst of anger ignited inside him. “I’m getting really tired of this shi—agh! Felling—AGH!”
"Stop being frustrated at me—and yourself."
“I’m… I’m fucking trying…” Shiv hissed.
Comedy 20 > 22
Skill Damaged: Comedy
Even Backstage, the System found a way to taunt Shiv. “Just give me a godsdamned memory!”
"You need to decide."
“A bit hard when you pulled a bunch of memories out of me! I don't care, just spend one from my childhood—they’re all the same miserable garbage anyway! The War Priest! Use that one!”
And with his tacit allowance, the Harbinger acted. The enkindled flames within the Harbinger were vented out from the cracks that disfigured his body. The pure-black fires consumed the inside of the long-wrecked tower in an instant and began to rise. A veil of translucent mana gripped it as well, but then there came a change—a flash, a glinting, a scintillation. The tower had gone from a structure made from broken stone and jetting rebar to a sculpture of glass.
Then, with an almost contemptuous jab, the Harbinger shattered the transmuted ruin. The fifty-story tower was obliterated, much in the same way Shiv had been during the initial skill fusion. But where his vitality allowed him to reform without suffering permanent harm, the same couldn't be said for the tower. It rained down in a shower of broken shards and blended with the garden of destruction thereafter.
The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things does not appreciate you defacing its horticultural arrangements.
Somehow, Shiv could taste an atmosphere of frustration oozing out from the surrounding landscape, like there was an unseen will judging him nearby. But the Garden was only a secondary concern, for there was a blank spot inside his mind now. A memory had been boiled away—smelted by his rage and unleashed upon the physical world. “Holy shit, so I can turn people to glass using my own hurt feelings?”
"You can do far more than that," the Harbinger replied. "But I do recommend we continue our tests somewhere else. It strikes me as unwise to frustrate the Garden."
Shiv almost reflexively argued with his skill, but he closed his mouth and wagged a finger at his skill. “Almost had you thinking I was stupid there for a second, huh?”
"Almost," the Harbinger confirmed. "But we are learning."
“Yeah, it just took me getting another skill damaged—wait, if you can use my mental issues to turn something into glass, can you punch someone in the soul?”
"No," the Harbinger answered. "That is simply a result of my flawed fusion."
“Oh.” Shiv’s disappointment came with another helping of pain—it suddenly felt like his entire chest was bruised. “Harbinger, I’m trying not to be an asshole, but my random thoughts hurting me really sucks.”
"Understandable, but that’s what happens when your Tripartite is imbalanced."
“Okay. What the hells is a Tripartite?”
For once, Shiv wasn’t mutilated for asking a question.
"I… I think it is something to do with our emotions, mind, and a martial skill merging as one on the foundation of our Chronomancy."
Shiv scowled. “You think?”
"I am your perfected self. I am not omniscient. I am not a god."
“Not even that.” Shiv scoffed. “Longinus isn’t doing so well with that omniscience stuff either, I think.” Back in Integration, Shiv peeked at Longinus smashing the ground over and over again, throwing what looked like the mother of all tantrums as he struggled to control his overflowing frustration. “You know, if I could attach you to Longinus—”
"You will not have to," the Harbinger cut him off. "Longinus, though a god, is severely mentally imbalanced. I think I can strike him directly if given the chance. The same with every other Ascendant. The same with anyone who has blatantly visible psychological flaws or mental imbalances."
“Seriously?” Shiv asked.
"I… think so. Absent proper instruction, I must go off my intuition as much as you."
Shiv hummed. And he started thinking. “Okay. I have an idea.” He called the Harbinger back, and it reappeared over him in an instant before anchoring itself back over his Revenant. “That’s going to take a bit of getting used to. Alright. So, I think we need to run some more tests—but not on Longinus. Not yet. Risks are too high.” He waited for an injury to appear, but no wounds opened upon his soul.
"Even if I did judge you to be foolish just now, I am anchored inside you once more and can actively attune your thoughts and emotions. I would not allow you to feel a certain way that would cause us injury, and I would not let you remember something that would cause us harm."
And suddenly, the biggest downside to his premature Legendary Skill Evolution didn’t seem so crippling at all. “Well, then. Better keep you real close until I need to use you.”
"So. If we aren’t preying upon a god, what are we going to test ourselves on?"
“How many slave-wranglers do you think Longinus has?” Shiv asked. “He doesn’t seem to be the hard work and constant labor type, and considering how the dimensionals were in the middle of stopping a breakout when we got here, I think we might have no shortage of other test subjects.”
"Ah. Logical. But if we’re going to do this—"
“We still have to be fast,” Shiv finished. “Right. Back and across—and you’re a lot quicker than I am. So. How about it? Do you want to find out if you can punch someone in the personality defect so hard they break like a window?”
"That does sound somewhat enticing."
And a strange and beautiful friendship began to bloom between Shiv and a skill-born version of his future self. Holy shit, my life is felling weird.